Ethan Hawke Would Return For The Black Phone 2 Under One Condition

According to Ethan Hawke, the only way he'd be interested in returning for "The Black Phone 2" or any sort of Blumhouse sequel would be if Scott Derrickson was also invited back to continue telling the story. 

"If Scott was involved, yeah," Hawke told Comicbook.com in an interview published on June 20. He added, "Sometimes sequels feel borne out of a storyteller's necessity to continue talking to you. And sometimes they feel borne out of a desire to make money off of the same poster again," Hawke said. "So I want to be the first. There's a difference." 

Throughout his entire career, Hawke had never once played a major villain until 2022 (via Variety). His Arthur Harrow and Grabber characters from "Moon Knight" and "The Black Phone" are the first official projects where Hawke has gotten to sink his teeth into something completely different and more menacing. Describing what his mindset has been like, the four-time Oscar nominee told Nerd Reactor that he was enjoying the plunge into the dark side, though also made a point to differentiate between his more sympathetic and logical Marvel character and the outright monster that The Grabber is. Hawke went on to joke that his foray into the malevolent side of things could just be a part of getting old. "Maybe it's turning 50, and the world wants me to be bad guys," he said. "I don't know. Maybe it's just I got tired of being the good guys. The life of an actor is funny. As you change, you start to get cast in different roles."